Of Ordinary Things
by tartan robes
Summary: "So much of him is patchwork, quilted pasts, trimmed and hemmed and sewn through. What they know of each other can be read between the stitching."
1. Fireside

_So sometimes, people like sensitivebore can coerce me into writing things again. I'm not sure I really want to post this, because I've been very out of it and I'm not super pleased with it, but for you, for you._

* * *

So much of him is patchwork, quilted pasts, trimmed and hemmed and sewn through. What they know of each other can be read between the stitching. She knows his spine. She knows his habits and the things he does but does not say. Balance is what they do. Management. She can catalogue his preferences with blind hands.

She doesn't know the stitches.

His birthday, for example. Never celebrated, never mentioned. (He prefers it that way, she thinks. Let them think he was sprung from the tides of tradition, carved out of Downton's stone and marble. Let them think he was always this way. He was always this way.) She has a few clever guesses, she could pinpoint the month, she believes. She expects he can do the same for her (balance is what they do). Instead, they exchange curt smiles over their arrival dates, good as a birth date in this house, in this position, in these circumstances.

"This day," he is fond of saying, when his tongue is mauve with wine and his lids heavy with the weight of the past (it always clings to him in the shadows, the dark streams of his veins, the creases beneath his eyes), "this day is when I properly began, Mrs. Hughes."

And that is all there is to be said on the matter. (That's all he thinks he ever says.)

She knows more than that of course. Runs her fingers between his binding, tugs gently at the pages, loosens a few words. He has let a great many things slip here and there. Nothing to paint a picture with, nothing incriminating. Merely steps, shards of grey-green glass and shell fragments one collects on the beach, crushes into powder with a careless squeeze of the palm. She handles these little phrases, half-anecdotes with gloved hands. She has been piecing together a mosaic of him for years.

She lies sometimes.

She knows his birthday. She knows the exact day.

He gets moody then. No, not moody, quiet. He gets quiet and careful. He shuts the door to his pantry tighter, sits up straighter in his chair.

Some years, she leaves him be.

Other times, that seems ill-advised.

So she closes the door behind her carefully. He has been, as she expected, harsher on the boys today. Quieter at meals. He barely said a word over supper. He looks silent now, too. His back is too rigid in a slanted chair, toes pointed to the fire. He is all black and white (how he wants it, how he needs it), black and white and clean-cut edges. The backs of his hands are yellow in the firelight, shadows falling harshly, measured, like tombstones along his face. He is staring into a silver moon-sliver of a mirror. She doesn't see that one often. Expects he keeps it in his room. (The stitches again, the stitches are what's missing. She doesn't know the geography of his room, hasn't mapped out what he leaves on the mountaintops of his nightstand, stashes back in the dark valleys of his drawers.)

"Come now, Mr. Carson," she clucks carefully, "you don't look that old." (Perhaps he will see the comment for what it is, knowledge, fingers in the hems, bodies **bared **inside-out. She knows, she knows, she always knows. Perhaps he will think nothing of it. A jest at his vanity. It doesn't matter. It's an introduction, a beginning.)

"A fool," he mouths the words, voice like candlelight, soft and faded, "sometimes all I see is a damn fool."

She knows this speech too. (Always knows.)

He has been insistent lately, the off-comment about how he is not old, not quite, not yet. She wonders if he's nervous. They have no legacy other than their work, accounts and orders and plates the perfect distance from table edges. She steps carefully, coming round from behind him. When she catches a slant of his face in that mirror, she thinks he looks the same.

She knows he doesn't think so.

She doesn't quite know what he sees, but she can guess. She can line the stones and gems and tiles up well enough, construct an abstract collage of Charles Carson.

The problem with him - no, merely one of the problems with him, is that Charles Carson only seeks the quantitative, never the qualitative. Success is a measured thing, must be a measured thing. Something that can be clipped and valued, weighed and tried.

He has to know he is better.

She thinks, with slight pity, but more remorse, that there is little one can quantify in a face.

So she settles herself into the chair opposite him. Quiet now, cat steps. The way she taught Anice to walk all those days back in Scotland. (Feline steps, hushed and dark, steps to avoid the lions.) Are cat steps quantitative or qualitative? She turns her head from the fire. He has not looked at her yet; he's still fixated on whatever man he sees in the mirror. (He doesn't see himself, not properly, not as she sees him.)

She flexes her fingers carefully, tips the mirror down. It lies upright in his palm, for a moment, their fingers almost touch. (How would he measure that? Her hand on his pulse, over his wrist. How would he?)

"There are no fools in this room, Mr. Carson," clips her voice, keeps it brief and stern. But this is not a rebuke; this is affection - as much as it has they know (as much of it as she can show him). "I wouldn't make it my business to suffer them." Pulls her mouth up into a smile.

He doesn't return it.

Some days, these days, she doesn't even think he sees her.

"I'm afraid you're in need of a new mirror, Mr. Carson, or a new pair of eyes."

Silence. He doesn't even have any wine picked out.

She lifts her fingers up from the warm glass, and her palm hovers over his for a moment. How easy, is what she thinks, how easy it would be to hold it. She could trace those lines, heart to life, show him that way.

She doesn't, of course, but she could.

Her palm hovers flat above his. "Clever hands, really. Does your mirror show you that? Balancing trays and polishing silver," she swallows," clever."

Her hand is traveling upwards, breaths away from the black fabric of his sleeve, the white of his tie.

"Strong too," she murmurs, "not just balancing, but heaving and carrying, bringing those wine stocks down the steps. The boys, the boys, it's their job, but they know you do it better, that you - you've got more on you."

She's not looking at his face anymore, hopes he only sees the fire in her cheeks. That the red is all emberlight, the pink a flush from the heat. For a moment, she contemplates touching a button, and her fingers dip down, flutter like moth wings. She stills herself. Fingers ghostwalking over the in-out of his chest, over where his heart thumps, decades strong, between bone and blood. A neck. The bob of his adam's apple, clench of his throat. Swallow. She could touch it. She could feel it.

The side of her thumb, she thinks, could line up perfectly with the slope of his jaw if only she pressed there, if only - she extends the thumb over the thin stroke of his mouth. "Stubborn. So quiet and obliging upstairs. Every perfect word. And soft, too, when you speak to the daughters, to the babes of the house. So soft." Withdraws the thumb, "And then so harsh and stern." She purses her lips here, only slightly, forces a dry laugh. This is affection. This is as much as she can allow. (This is too much.) She doesn't think about the dryness in her throat. She doesn't dream about his tongue, a wine-stained kiss. "So quick to scold and to judge as soon as the steps have been descended." He doesn't smile. She does.

His skin is warm and orange and red in the light and she expects hers is too, some kind of mirror. She can see bits of her in the darkness of his eyes, holds her fingers a sigh above the dark rims beneath his eyes. Her thumb moves, pretends to sweep away the dark valleys, smooth out the creases in his brow.

"But you see things, Mr. Carson," is what she's whispering now. Her body has leaned into his and caught all the light between their chests. "Not everything. But you know this family so well, what they want and when they want it and how they want it, you -"

"You know us so well."

Her lips are too close. She can feel his breath, the last drops of alcohol warm and steady between his parted lips. She doesn't think of the corners of his mouth, the feeling of his tongue.

She can feel the stitches now, not just the spaces between them.

She pulls away. The light escapes from between their ribs, crawls back along the floorboards. (Hand flying backwards, eyes and jaw and throat and pulse, broad shoulders, strong wrist, palm over palm, heart line over lifeline.)

"I only wish you saw yourself just as well."

Tight smile. She pulls in her lips, swallows the reflection of the flames.

She knows him so well, she thinks.

But qualitatively or quantitatively?

She turns her head back to the flames.

* * *

_I guess there might be more one-shots here later, provided I feel up for it. Maybe they'll even be half-decent. (If you want to leave prompts of things you'd like to see, there are any number of ways to reach me, and you're welcome to contact me through any of them and tell me what you want, what you really, really want.)_


	2. Intimacy

_Thank you for all the kind words and feedback. Continuing to get in the swing of things:_

* * *

They undress each other in increments.

A slow sort of thing. They've been doing it for weeks now, but the ritual is still hesitant, clumsy in calloused hands. He will place a hand on her hip and unclasp the chain of keys, pause there, her thumb and forefinger pressed lightly on his wrist. She'll remove the cufflinks. There will be a breath, the shudder of a heartbeat. She'll leave first, unknot his tie, pull it lose by a fraction or two, measured in the constriction of his lungs, the slow lurching pulse in her chest. His turn then, fingers on the side of her throat, sometimes, barely, on the underside of her jaw. He'll remove the brooch, watch the dark petals of her collar fold open. She'll swallow.

When they are feeling bold or perhaps slightly drunk, he will let his fingers rest there, between her collarbones, press them to the base of her neck and push gently on the bone. She'll keep her hands around his wrist, but her thumb will brush downward, stroke the skin beneath the shadow of his sleeve. Touch, carefully, what she cannot see. Bite her lip then, and he'll watch her, breathing stilled, for that small pull, white on pink. She'll hold her thumb there, run it down a vein, as far as she can go.

It has been weeks, and she knows every inch of his wrist, the weight of his forearm, the size of it in her hand. And he has traced her collarbones, the muscles along her neck; he has held the slope of her jaw - not at once, not as one might, not in a single night, but over the course of them all. First a single finger on her chin, the next night, where the bone meets her ear. It's a slow game of connect-the-dots. He draws her face carefully.

And this is, all of it, this is all nothing. It is hardly even improper. She still apologizes if she misjudges her touch, bends her fingers over his chest instead of the black of his tie. It is nothing, it is truly nothing that he touches her neck, holds it like the stem of a wine glass, fragile.

They touch each other as though they are breakable things.

Because they are, in ways. The raised voices, the cuts and jabs, are all forgiven, but this, this trapeze-wire dance, this circus act told though silences and gasps, mimed out in what they do not do, rather than what they do – this has been fashioned from glass. If his fingers were to slide over the side of her breast, linger too long on her hip. If they were to pull, gently, at the fabric between her thighs. If she were to lean too close, if she were to colour his neck in pink and white, rest her tongue on the shadow of his chin. They are a fragile thing.

They are trying, in the only way they know how to, to hold each other. And he kisses her with the warmth of his hands because his mouth is too dry and his muscles are made of stone. (Sometimes they bend, frozen in tableau, as though they are sculptures, carved this way, hand on wrist, fingers on jaw, as though their palms have known no other touch, their hearts no other position.)

(As though they are something heavier, something more solid than what they are.)

But it is intimacy. It is the only intimacy they know, and it isn't something new or something sudden. It has been there all along, in the tealeaves she will clean from their cups before they ascend the steps, in his silhouette in her doorway when he says his goodnight. It's been there, sleeping, in their second glasses of wine, whispered into porcelain rims over meals. This is not new language. It is something old, older than that second, shadow voice in his throat that used to speak in songs, older than the careful dappling of bruises beneath her skin. This is what they have been saying, trying to say, from the very start, whispered through the stretch of fingertips and the slow turn of a wrist.

It is nothing, really. Her hand will curve around the bend of his wrist when it isn't there, when there's nothing left to hold, and he sleeps with the imprint of neck in his mind. When they let go of each other, there is no longing, no bitterness. He turns off the light. She walks up the steps with him. Their hands don't touch.

But he thinks he knows her better, that gap between her collarbones. He has seen nothing else of her (he's not sure he will see anything else of her), and somehow this is enough, this is more than enough. His fingers pressed in that space, against the steady ridge of bone.

In touches they have learned to say the words their throats can no longer carry (age and duty, pride and necessity, all the things that have made them stiff, all the things that have made them worthy of each other.)

So each night he promises to hold her jaw more fully, to roll up a bit more of his sleeve, scatter away the lazy shadows, to tell her he loves her in the only way they know how to say it.


	3. Patterns

_Rewatching bits of 1x07. This just happened and it lacks a good amount of direction, but it's maybe a revisitation of "Coming Home" and kind of "Only Half Himself" as well. Hm. Anyway._

* * *

When they finally do, they don't. Which is typical of them, thoroughly predictable, expected. But they were always creatures of habit.

And she has just learned how to touch his face without flinching, pulling back. And he does not just hold her hand; he reaches it for it now too. (Lifeline against lifeline. He does not believe in superstitions, threw away all the fortunes and crumpled tarot cards when he left the stage, but he has raised her hand in the dark, turned it round in the moonlight. Compared his crease from hers, that one curving cut between their patchwork of bruises and calluses and lines that came with age and sweat and work. He had hoped to find them of equal length. He hadn't mentioned it in the morning, pretend not to see the boundaries of her palm in the mouth of his teacup. She would have laughed at him, maybe. It wasn't important.)

It's not that she's shy. She has seen horses and cattle, hens and roosters, she has seen animals take each other, roughly go about it. But it is still a shadow thing. You don't talk about it – and you certainly don't want it. (And you forget too, in some ways, wind your body up so tight in keys and accounts and the floors of someone else's house that you forget how to long for any other blanket, any other warmth.) It's simply not how it's done. Not for people of their profession (because they still are servants, they'll always be servants), of their age and wealth.

Isn't it enough? The window that doesn't shut properly. The tidy row of flowers they planted beneath it. The family gave them a generous pick of the library, and so there is still the smell of the big house, the soap that's come to furnish their skin, when they open a page. He says they'll plant a proper garden too, for want of something to do. And she looks forward to it, the way she now looks forward to all things with him, that small smile, the laziness of its certainty a comfort. She is in need of something to weed out and inspect and groom anyway. They both are. (If this isn't enough, then what is?)

And though she won't look at him at night and his face is too flushed and his head always tilted away, she will move her hands around his chest, button up his nightshirt with firefly touches, fast and bright and warm, the side of her face against the arch of his shoulder. (If this isn't enough, then what is?) They sleep with their backs against one another, spine parallel. They've always slept this way and neither of them sees any reason to change it.

Not much of this life is different.

He forgets things sometimes, his book in the other room, to pour two cups of tea, and he dreams of things in a murmuring voice, stories she was never told. (It's fine. They don't talk about the nights she leaves their bed, stands by that open window and adjusts flower petals with a shaking hand.)

It will be summer soon and she says it with that slow smile, pouring out the tea, gasps of steam collecting between them, evaporating just as quickly. She had helped him into his shirt this morning, his muscles too raw and bones too stiff. He can still feel her fingerprints on his arm. "A whole season to ourselves for once," is what she says.

_Dirty, noisy, quite enjoyable_, is how he described it once. London. She hasn't been in a very long time. She supposes they never will again. _Dirty, noisy, quite enjoyable_. She remembers laughing at the comment then, but now she twists her fingers together beneath the table, stares at the weight of his brow and the slow swallow of his throat. He sets down his teacup. And there it is, that small pause, the moment, she thinks, he goes to their window. The moment he adjusts the petals of his mind with a quivering hand. She forces the smile, looks away. She has never known him in the season, not past letters and that flourish of a signature she's certain she could forge with her eyes closed. The things he whispers in the dark, the things he has seen over summers – the parts of him she will never know.

There he is though, clarity back in the way he sees her (it's the most rattling then, the way he looks at her, only sometimes, as though it hasn't been three decades, less, more) and he takes her cup from her, stands with purpose. There he is. The sink is a small metal thing and she reaches around him as he sets their cups down, holds his hand, presses her forehead against his shoulder blade.

They have time, still. They have a summer. Maybe more. She prays, sometimes, when the room is dark and their breathing is so even it might be one and the same, she prays for more.

She'll know him this season. And if that isn't enough, then what is?

(If this isn't love, then what is?)


End file.
